Favorite headline of the day: Senator Helms Moves to Rehabilitation. Presumably at the Betty Ford Center for Recovering Assholes. I believe he received a pig heart, which is too good and fitting a story to ruin by checking the facts, so I won’t.

Oh, driving on I5 I passed an old VW wagon filled with college signs, with a cardboard sign in the rear window saying “Show Us Your Tits.” I thought about it, but in the end failed to comply.

Second favorite headline of the day: Cabbage Machine Crushes Man to Death. And cuts off another guy’s arm. It’s not every day someone dies in the cause of cole slaw.

An even better death (hey, I had to drive 400 miles listening to the radio whitter on about dirty bombs, I deserve a little gruesome entertainment) was that of Peter Mokaba, one of South Africa’s “There is no such thing as AIDS” brigade. I don’t think I have to tell you what he died of.

So what *really* happened at the loya jirga today? The whole thing always seemed like a way to broker deals under the spurious guise of “tradition,” instead of the usual spurious guise of rigged elections. But the self-selected body really wanted the king back, and the Americans stepped in to, what, bribe? threaten? him into refusing any part, thus ensuring (helped along by the occasional assassination and assassination attempt by the CIA) that the US’s puppet government continues another term of puppetry.

The Washington Post Monday caught up with the Bush Doctrine, which I mentioned a few days ago. No longer will we be able to complain about Pearl Harbors and cowardly sneak attacks. Those will be ours. The Bushies are now trying to sell NATO, sort of. The sort of is that they’re claiming preemptive attacks aren’t explicitly ruled out by the NATO charter, so they must already be NATO policy. In the 17th century and beyond, various European countries had sumptuary laws, which said what clothes certain classes were and were not allowed to wear, the idea being that social class should be visible at all times. The Bush Doctrine proclaims the same sort of thing for certain weapons. Especially symbolic of this is that they are trying to develop small nuclear devices to destroy well-protected, dug-in weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld has told NATO that the standard of proof need not be very high, either, before an attack is launched.

The UN World Summit on Food is meeting in Rome to discuss world hunger. They are too embarrassed even to vote on whether there is a “right to food.” The delegates were, of course, well fed (the menu may be found in the London Times article on the story), although those from the richer countries didn’t dare show up at the banquet.

The Tuesday Post has a piece that wonders how the US will deal with armies containing conscripted 12-year olds, as so many do.

A guy shot up a Benedictine monastery today, killing two monks. The Church wanted to know if the guy was a priest, because they’re allowed one atrocity or child-rape free under the Two Tykes and You’re Out policy.

The Supreme Court rules 5-4 that prisons can punish convicted sex
offenders who refuse to admit guilt during therapy. I think mandating therapy is already a violation of their 1st Amendment rights, but that issue doesn’t even seem to have come up. Instead the Supes astonishingly saw no violation of the 5th Amendment in a requirement that a prisoner sign an “admission of guilt” form and, oh yes, list all his victims. The punishments involved seem to include going into maximum security and taking away his tv, but you know that some states must be keeping prisoners in jail for more of their terms. So it’s not just “terrorists” who have no rights in the US.

And note that Bush was able to remove all the rights of an American citizen unconvicted of any crime (the dirty nuke guy), including the right to see an attorney, or to any form of trial whatever, simply by signing a piece of paper. Just the way to treat someone who hates liberty, I say!

I haven’t decided whether to take the whole dirty bomb thing seriously or not.

So why wasn’t the ATF included in the Heimat Security Fiefdom, even though it was key in breaking the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and involved in Oklahoma City and other terrorist investigations? Think it’s part of Ashcroft’s campaign to make sure that no information on gun ownership is ever used for law enforcement purposes? Me too.

The Interior Department is buying out, for $235 million, offshore oil & gas leases off the Florida coast but refused to do same for California. Not for political reasons, but because, evidently, California is not opposed to offshore drilling like Florida is. At least that’s what the Interior Dept says.

A website offers pictures of women, excuse me, “homicide mothers”, at abortion clinics.

The Sunday Chronicle has a section on the FBI’s relationship with Reagan when he was governor, and their mutual attempt to wipe out the UC system. Not to be missed. www.sfgate.com/campus

The House has voted to kill the estate tax. Unfortunately, when the estate tax’s will was then read, it turned out that it had willed us all a major increase in the deficit.

The California Supreme Court (finally a California story worth passing on, after a week and a half of reading the LA Times--unless you want to know about Valley secession, which has pit brother against brother, surfer dude against Valley girl, all very Ken Burnsian) grants both paternity and custody to a guy who is not the kid’s biological father or even married to the mother, but acted as the kid’s father. Advocates of gay adoption see this as a great victory, although biology has always been secondary in establishing parenthood under the law. The British are talking about a law to prevent “fathers” DNA-testing their putative children.

Speaking of British parenting, the joke I’ve been meaning to send for a week: at the Royal Jubilee, it had been announced that the Queen would go on stage to sing All You Need is Love with Paul McCartney. This did not happen, presumably because he was unwilling to rewrite the lyrics, like Elton John did with that Diana song, to All You Need is Repressed, Unexpressed, Horribly Awkward Love.

Bush’s solution to the problem of bureaucratic infighting among the intelligence agencies is to create another bureaucracy. Who say’s he’s a Washington outsider?

It wouldn’t even resolve the problem of the infighting, just create a new body for the FBI and CIA to stonewall.

Of course if you over-centralize intelligence, it leaves it open to moles, as we know from John Le Carre’s Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy.

In 2000 there were only 16 children put up for adoption in Sweden. How?

Ah, rich Republicans. Mitt Romney, candidate for governor in Mass., actually claims that his primary residence is in Utah, in order to save on his taxes. The funny part, for a Republican running in Taxacheussets, is that the taxes are Utah property taxes.

Bush on the EPA’s report acknowledging the existence of global warming: “I read the report put out by the bureaucracy.” My, the contempt just drips from his tongue, doesn’t it? Oh, and he didn’t so much read it as color it in.

There’s a piece in today’s NY Times op-ed section on why the whistle-blowers at the FBI and Enron were women. Basically, it was because women have no insider status and found that they could only change their workplace by going outside it. The author: Anita Hill.

Long to reign over us

Hard to get any sense out of the British papers today, given the Jubilee celebrations. The Queen was wearing a stunning ensemble from the Dowdy Matron collection, circa 1955. My fellow cultural historians will have a field day in future generations explaining Dame Edna Everidge and Ozzy Osbourne’s prominence. God forbid they should celebrate with excerpts from Shakespeare or, I don’t know, Upstairs Downstairs.

Speaking of the fear of high culture, TNT just ran a version of King Lear transposed to the Old West (haven’t seen it yet) with Patrick Stewart. Notably, in their commercials for it, they didn’t mention Lear or Shakespeare.

A court in India makes illegal any assembly of 4 or more pigs. Cows, meanwhile, do whatever they like. Can’t we all just get along?

A girl in England has been excused from school because she bursts into tears every time she sees a school uniform. She has been diagnosed with “school phobia.” Of course when a middle-aged Tory bursts into tears when he sees a school uniform, it’s something else entirely.

A couple of Salvadoran military chiefs look to go on trial in Florida for atrocities committed in the early 1980s. Two more war criminals I didn’t know had been given asylum. I’m not sure what they’ve been doing while here. You’ll remember that the guy who shot the Vietcong captive in the head in the most famous photo from the Vietnam war owned a pizza shop in Virginia.

Arafat overrules a court to keep in jail someone Israel has ordered him to keep in jail, and fuck the rule of law. Actually, the NY Times quotes a Clinton staffer as saying that their policy in such cases was “I don’t think we really cared about due process.” Hey, no kidding. As I’ve been saying, the US policy re Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, etc has been that “terrorists” should be kept in jail, no “revolving door,” but not actually ever put on trial.

In a drug store yesterday, saw the most disgusting sign ever: “Assorted incontinence on clearance.”

Some of the Pacific Coast Highway is now the American Veterans of the Vietnam War Memorial Highway. ‘Cause you never know when PCH is just gonna SNAP.

Saw my opthamologist yesterday. She told me I have a hernia.

See William Safire’s column in the Monday NY Times castigating the FBI’s assumption of new powers. Or better yet, don’t, so that I can use his phrase “Congressional undersight,” and you’ll think I invented it.

I said within a couple of days of 9/11 that the hijackers didn’t require anywhere near the level of organization that everyone was saying. But I didn’t realize they were actually complete idiots. Various terrorist types were all using the same cell phone; some of the hijackers had previously done a milk run flight all together, breaking the basic security of keeping cells separate from each other, which any 8-year old knows. The point being that not only should the FBI and CIA have been talking to each other and to others (I like that the State Dept routinely renewed visas of people known to the CIA, which hadn’t told anyone to watch out for them), but that the whole network could rather easily have been rolled up.

There is finally a Bush Doctrine, not that anyone was paying much
attention: first strike, preemptive action against countries that haven’t actually done anything, but are lookin’ at us funny. Which is a legitimate defense in a Texas court.

The Cal. legislature buries the bill to ban Indian mascots at public schools. It was a tough choice, really: perpetuate Indian stereotypes or California PC stereotypes.

The FBI has finally decided that what it really needs in the war on terrorism is more power. There’s a surprise. On Tuesday they announced new powers for the central hq of the FBI. On Wednesday, more powers for agents in the field. Next up: janitors will be able to strip search any celebrity they want, at random (the janitors have an even better union than the field agents). Does anyone really believe that the FBI wasn’t able to surf the internet?

PETA has been fighting off the infiltration and counter-intelligence operations of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey. When the circuses have their own secret agents, you know you’re in trouble.

Some days, life hands you the perfect straight line. In this case, it was a business news report that McDonald’s was going to start selling “non-food items.”

Denmark pulls in the welcome mat, enacting an extraordinarily tight immigration law. This is in part thanks to the presence of a racist party in the new coalition government, but I wouldn’t absolve the rest of the government. For example, did anyone in the cabinet rebuke the leader of the Danish People’s Party for saying that Muslims have a taste for mass rape?

Britain is similarly moving to an instant-deportation system for those rejected for political asylum. On the other hand, they do now have the first ever black cabinet minister.

The Bush administration decided that the way to deal with failing Indian reservation schools run by the BIA was to privatize them, but stepped back after the obvious protests.

Colin Powell was on McNeil-Lehrer yesterday threatening India or Pakistan with worldwide condemnation if they start a nuclear war. Right, they’re not afraid of having Delhi or Islamabad hiroshimaed, but they’re terrified of “worldwide condemnation.”

Ever wonder where your old computers go when you throw them out? The answer was China, where these and other highly dangerous electronic components (“e-waste”) are stripped by little children without protective gear, and the drinking water polluted. Actually, China just banned the import of such products. The US is the only industrial country which didn’t sign up to a 1989 convention against exporting hazardous waste.

Speaking of which, Zimbabwe, though on the brink of starvation thanks to being run by an idiot, has refused an offer from the US of $9 million worth of maize, because the US would not certify that it wasn’t genetically modified.

Drano

Before going in to meet Pootie-Poot, Bush spit out his gum into his hand. The image led every Russian news report.

At a Russian university, somebody asked him about the brain drain. Bush’s response: “It’s gonna take a lotta brains in Russia to create a drain.”

Colombia, which is Spanish for “Vietnam, but with better drugs,” just elected the right-wing-death-squad candidate president. He’s promising to kill lots of guerillas, and to do it with lots of American money.

Amusing reading of the week: the British embassy in Japan has issued a pamphlet on how to deal with English football fans--serve beer in plastic cups, messages in English on how to sort their garbage, learn a few English phrases like Hello and England are a very good team. “You might be afraid of their big bodies and large numbers....” (found at guardian.co.uk/worldlatest)

A couple of days ago, Bush said that Cuba was like a prison, with no civil rights. As opposed to the part of the island the US occupies.

An Israeli astronaut, the first, is going into space in, um, July I think. He has requested the Kosher meal. Tang and gefilte fish.

A lot of Russia’s criminals are orphans, and there are many orphans because life expectancy is so low now. But one boy was lucky. A couple took him from the orphanage. Unfortunately, they also made him clean his room. He’s 12, by the way. He didn’t like having to clean his room. Fortunately, he knew some criminals. From the orphanage. So he arranged a hit.

When the pope was in Bulgaria, he brought a present. A piece of Pope John XXIII (who was once a priest in Sofia). They won’t say what part. The Guardian story said that if anyone else got on a plane with a body part in his luggage, he might be in some trouble. If you’re a pope, evidently that’s considered normal behaviour.

You probably missed it, but there was a threat of invasion against Pakistan this week because it’s harboring terrorists. The threat came from General John Keane, #2 in the US Army. Fortunately, the Ghauri missile they tested today can’t reach the US (it’s named after a 12th Century warlord type who beat the shit out of some Indians). By the way, Pakistan evidently has many more nukes than we realized, thanks to a crash program to produce weapons-grade uranium. I don’t think westerners realize how ready both sides are to use their nukes. For a start, these are not world-ending weapons. They’re mostly only about 15 kilotons, which is enough to destroy Hiroshima but not enough to set off nuclear winter. They are, in a word, usable. And they’re five minutes away from their targets, which creates a lot of incentives to shoot first when that sparrow sets off your radar.

One last joke about Bush’s speech at the Reichstag: He called terrorism the new totalitarian threat, at which point half the deputies thought: I knew Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler was a friend of mine....

Women wishing to join the Indonesian military must pass a virginity test.

In Moscow, Dubya and Pootie-Poot sign the new treaty, which finally has a name (although I believe both sides have their own name for it, which is what happens when you don’t negotiate long enough): the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty. Yes, it’s SORT of a treaty. That should be easy to remember, and to make it easier, before long it’ll be the only acronym you need to know. In 3 weeks the US will renounce the ABM Treaty, and Russia will declare Start II dead in response.

Which reminds me: if you were the leader of a country in danger of nuclear warfare, what would you do to reduce tensions? If you answered, announce a missile test, then your name must be Musharaf, because no one else is that stupid.

Bill Clinton has been in China giving a speech on “The World Trade Organization and the Chinese Real Estate Economy.” Except it wasn’t, because he didn’t do any homework for it, so he just rambled on for 30 minutes about the time he visited China in 1998 and whatnot, and then collected his check for $250,000. Jeez, I hope Carter at least came back from Cuba with a few smuggled Havanas for his trouble.

The Israeli plan to turn the West Bank into not one but eight giant prison camps proceeds apace. Trucks will not be allowed to travel between them, so goods will have to be unloaded and change trucks, for no very good reason except to destroy the Palestinian economy. And Palestinians with Palestinian papers or, amazingly enough, from East Jerusalem, will not be allowed into Israel, nor Israeli Palestinians into Palestine.

The FBI may not have been able to detect terrorism, but it did root out yet more traitors within the Bureau itself, punishing those agents who passed information to the Enemy--the Central Intelligence Agency. The one good piece of news out of all this is that the FBI failed in its attempt to get a warrant to tap Moussaoui. I’d heard that those requests were never ever rejected.

Drooling in the Vatican, drivel in Berlin

The NY Times today informs us that the pope cannot always control his saliva and that aides have to wipe it for him. Ok, but here’s the thing: there must have been great competition for that job.

In case you’re not paying attention, India and Pakistan have 1 million soldiers facing each other (and Britain is still selling them weapons, don’t know about the US). And both sides are too stupid to back down.

Bush gives a speech at the Reichstag. And unlike JFK, he really is a jelly donut. He said “We are defending civilization itself.” Just don’t ask him to spell it (although to be fair, the London Times spelled it with an “s”). He said this is in the capital of civilization for the last century, Berlin. He said that 9/11 was a dividing line as sharp and clear as Pearl Harbor. Which is probably his way of reminding the Europeans just how late the US entered the Second World War. Of maybe he thinks the war actually started on September 7th, 1941 (the day his father thought Pearl Harbor was). He sought to allay fears of an Iraq invasion: “I have no war plans on my desk.” So what do you think he does have on his desk? An electric train set? A collection of Spider-Man comics? A case of tequila?

Kudos to Jesse Ventura, for vetoing making the pledge of allegiance mandatory in schools.

Last night was another edition of Celebrity Boxing, which again I did not watch, although I understand that Horshack risked his new nose. Call me when it’s Jesse Ventura against Gary Condit.

The Washington Post headline of a study reported in the Journal of the Bleeding Obvious: “Uninsured Don’t Get Needed Health Care.”

In today’s NY Times, an unnamed spokesman, questioned about the failure to raise the Tom Ridge Color of the Day from yellow to orange, says “There is a certain art to this.” Let me help you out, chuckles: you add red to the yellow to make orange.

The FBI agent who wrote the Phoenix memo is the guy who was instrumental in breaking the Oklahoma city bombing.

Let me correct the NY Times, which says that Ariel Sharon threw the Shas Party out of government because he plans to reduce subsidies to families with more than two children (the paper helpfully adds that devout Jews have many many children) (I added the second “many”). Actually, he planned to reduce subsidies to families with many many children who duck military service, like many devout Jews do. Also, interestingly enough, Sharon plans to cut subsidies to settlers.

I said the US should apologize to East Timor. It seems what it’s actually been doing since Bush got into office is trying to screw Timor. Should have known: it’s got oil. Now the UN administration that’s been overseeing the place for the last 3 years has been re-negotiating the sweetheart energy contracts the Indonesians had. Which means the UN was negotiating with one of its members, Australia, which is a bit odd; also, they really should have left this, which more than anything determines the future of the country, to the post-independence government. One of the oil companies is Phillips Petroleum. Anyway, some Aussies met Dick Cheney, who started putting pressure on the Timorese. Also, Colin Powell put further pressure on them to sign a document refusing to accuse any Americans in the new international tribunal, presumably UN peacekeepers--except there are none from the US--so possibly protecting Henry Kissinger and, remind me again, who was the Director of Central Intelligence at the time?

Blame

In environmental news, the Japanese failed to overturn the ban on whaling, so they’ll just have to keep breaking it.

In other environmental news, Britain opens the first cow-shit-fired power station.

Bush should have greeted the independence of East Timor with a hearty apology for the US giving a green light to Indonesia to invade in 1975, but .... say, 1975, wasn’t his dad in charge of the CIA in 1975?

Britain legalizes adoption by gay couples, as couples, and other unmarried couples together for 2 years or longer.

Followup: the guy sent to jail for stealing golf balls has had his sentence over-turned.

Bush’s nickname for Vladimir Putin is Pootie-Poot. We are governed by a five-year old, folks. I have a theory about W. Remember Tom Hanks in “Big”?

Condi Rice said that the warning Bush got on 8/6/01 was vague and only 1 1/2 pages. Whose fault is that? Bush made it clear early on that he didn’t want to be given any report longer than 2 pages.

The first head we need on a platter over this is John Ashcroft’s. His sole interest was the drug war, including, you’ll remember, raids on medical marijuana farms in California. For example, he sent up a proposal to Bush, on Sept. 10, calling for increases in the funding of 68 programs, none of them counter-terrorism. Being briefed by outgoing FBI Director Louis Freeh, he didn’t want to hear a thing about that subject. And he sent a memo to department heads, I think also Sept 10, listing his top priorities, none of which were terrorism. However in July, he did take action on threat assessments: he stopped flying commercial airliners and started taking chartered private jets.

Everyone in the admin had higher priorities. You’ll remmeber that Ashcroft’s pro-gun fanaticism was such that he had records destroyed after 9/11 that might have helped in tracking terrorists. And Treasury Sec Paul O’Neill hampered efforts to track terrorist money by his concern to help his friends by stopping efforts to stop money laundering and tax havens. Donald Rumsfeld refused to shift budget monies from his beloved Star Wars to anti-terrorism, and evidently stopped flights by the CIA Predator spy-plane started under Clinton to try to track Bin Laden---because of a turf war between the Pentagon and the CIA.

You’ll notice that with all the Bushie efforts to scare us this week, the Tom Ridge Color of the Day hasn’t moved off yellow.

Speaking of colors, did you know that carrots weren’t orange until the 16th century? It was an ideological thing in the Netherlands. Someone is now selling purple carrots, the way God intended.

I could make a joke about Stephen Jay Gould here, but I won’t.

One point about the pre-9/11 intelligence failures is that the Bushies have been insisting that to fight terrorism properly they needed to rip up the Constitution, but in fact they had about as much evidence as they really required well before they started pissing on the Bill of Rights.

Dick Cheney warns that there could be another terrorist attack any second. Well that would certainly distract the media from past intelligent failures, wouldn’t it? And if someone else makes that comment, he can just say that the opposition complains when they withhold vague warnings, and when they make them. Win win, isn’t it?

It occurred to me that the attempt by the Catholic church to blame everything on those darned homosexuals is sort of a step forward, in that it has to contain an acknowledgement of homosexuality as a sexual orientation rather than a mental disorder. What would be interesting is a definitive statement of church policy as to what exactly paedophilia is. I’m increasingly inclined to think of it as a sexual orientation, which is highly problematic in terms of how you deal with it. It’s too bad that the church, while espousing celibacy for priests, evidently knows nothing about how to keep people celibate, since that would be useful for paedophiles.

Sinn Fein wins 5 seats in the Irish parliament, including 2
former IRA leaders/gunrunners.

Israel is busily cantonizing the West Bank, turning it into 8 little bantustans, requiring Israeli permits to move between them.

Good article in the Guardian by Madeleine Bunting (www.guardian.co.uk/columnists) on the failure of military operations in Afghanistan.

Some British ramblers have failed in court to establish a right of way in Sussex that would have allowed ramblers to see some beautiful natural sights. It would have gone through a nudist camp. Nice try.

If you have #10,000 to spare, you can buy H G Wells’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He drew dirty pictures in the margins.

US troops arrive in yet another country, Soviet Georgia, in order to protect terrorists. Seriously. Georgia harbors Chechens it’s unwilling to do anything about, and this mission seems to be our way of telling Russia not to invade because Georgia is our colony now.

At the detention facilities of the war crimes tribunal, Milosevic is best man at another prisoner’s wedding. Somehow, even in a group of Serb war criminals, I doubt that Milosevic is the best man.

So what do I think should go in the World Trade Center site? How about a pillory? We lock the directors of the CIA and FBI and, oh, Condaleeza Rice, in stocks and everyone gets to throw fruit at them. Good for the NY street vendors, good for tourism, infinitely less destructive than bombing Kabul.

A NY Times columnist makes the case that whatever Al Qaeda were up to, it was never going to be simple hijacking, which was not their style at all. And that’s even without the advanced warning it now seems we had from multiple sources dating back to 1996 (to say nothing of the original attack on the World Trade Center: if there’s one thing that Dubya understands--just ask Iraq--it’s that simmering resentment about the big one that got away). I’ve heard asked several times, But what could we have done differently if the warnings had been made public? There’s an answer to that which is not only obvious (so why has no one but me come up with it?)(or maybe someone is sending a letter to the Times right now--my flight Simulator joke turned up in today’s paper), it actually happened: the Pennsylvania plane. The passengers crashed the plane once they had figured out what was going on--might not the pilots, crew and passengers of the other planes have done so, too, had they had advanced warning? A second obvious answer is, if a warning had been made, maybe they’d have cancelled or postponed the attack, giving the FBI time to catch them. That answer also hasn’t appeared anywhere.

Ari Fleischer, speaking for the American people, says “They will welcome an inquiry if it’s free from politics, led by the responsible experts, and the determinations of what should be looked into are made on the basis of intelligence analysis and not political considerations.” In other words, let the same bozos at the FBI and CIA who originally fucked up determine the lines of inquiry.

And Laura Bush is wheeled out to say: “I think it is very said that people would play upon the victims’ families’ emotions, or all Americans’ emotions.” You mean the way you just did, Laura? Another candidate for the pillory.

Speaking of leaving cover-ups, I mean inquiries, to the responsible experts, only the NY Times seems to have had the story of an article by a Vatican lawyer, obviously vetted by his bosses, trying to prevent inquiries into paedophile priests spread from the US. He says that bishops shouldn’t give any information to secular authorities, shouldn’t force psychological testing on the priests, and should continue to transfer them without staining their good names [yes, in those words] by informing the new parish.

US military aid to Indonesia is about to resume, at midnight Sunday, when East Timor becomes independent.

Kaiser Permanente, which is so evil that its executives all dress as Darth Vader except that the helmet has a spike at the top (get it, Kaiser, German helmet, get it?), had a policy of paying its telephone clerks bonuses based on how quickly they got off the phone with sick people, and how few appointments with doctors they scheduled. TELEPHONE CLERKS!

The Russians are crowing over having assassinated a Chechen warlord, which they did by sending him a letter. Laced with poison. It’s nice to see the KGB up and running again, isn’t it?

If you go into the woods today: Economic conferences are no longer held in cities, at the request of the local McDonald’s and Starbuck’s franchises, I believe. So the G8 is due to meet in the Canadian Rockies. Only they just realized that it was the start of the grizzly bear hunting season--that is, hunting *by* the grizzlies. Secret services are a little nervous.

Gerhard Schroeder successfully defends his crown, as a German court rules that his hair really is that color.

Jimmy Carter and the White House agree that Castro won’t let dissidents speak out.

On a completely unrelated matter, Dick Cheney warns Democrats not to question the government’s handling of 9/11. It is irresponsible in a time of war, he says, and calls it “incendiary,” perhaps not the best choice of words. In a second day of spin rather than truth-telling, Bush, who came in second in the last election, says that Washington is a place where second guessing has become second nature. He is actually annoyed that people are upset by his cover-up. Bush: “Had I known that the enemy was going to use aeroplanes [I copied this from the London Times] to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people.” Ah, so he needed to know the exact day, the exact time of day, and the exact method of attack before he could do anything. It seems that FBI agents were predicting that planes could be crashed into buidlings, so it wasn’t quite as unimaginable as the White House was claiming yesterday. Hell, has Ari Fleischer never played Flight Simulator? I’ve personally crashed an aeroplane into the Sears Tower on more than one occasion.

Lithuania scraps its requirement that women get gynaecological exams before being issued drivers’ licenses.

The results of the Dutch elections sucked, as predicted, and the anti-immigrant Insert Pun-Based-on-Fortuyn-Here Party will join the next government. One immediate result: the next German chancellor came out in favor of curbing immigration and preventing Turkey joining the EU. He says immigrants must start integrating. You know, eating sausage, invading Poland, that sort of thing.

The outgoing German chancellor, Gerhard “No chance in hell” Schroder, is now pissed at Stern magazine for running a faked picture of him naked but for a figleaf. Given that his other big concern is newspapers saying he dyes his hair, I presume this is because the figleaf prevented the German public seeing if the carpet matched the drapes.

I’ve just disgusted myself.

As I mentioned before, the British hailed Operation Snipe as a success despite failing to find a single enemy. It also turned out that those caves full of munitions they blew up belonged to one of the “good” warlords.

Finally, Bush’s horrible horrible screw-up (snort, giggle giggle). OK, we knew 9/11 was a horrendous intelligence failure. Right now I’m actually more pissed off at Congress, which after 9/11 completely failed to investigate that failure, and hence 9 months later didn’t know that there was advanced warning. The analogies to Pearl Harbor just keep getting more apt, don’t they? What will really hurt Bush was the cover-up. The line that they only thought there would be regular hijackings, which was all they had today, seems particularly inept, since they don’t seem to have done anything to prevent those either, and if they had, it would obviously have stopped what actually happened. The airlines deny ever having received the warning the Bushies are claiming they put out. And what makes it look worse, Bush got the warning while he was on vacation, and perhaps paying less attention than usual. I’m going to enjoy this.

The Japanese are literally preparing for an invasion. English football fans, for next month’s round of the World Cup at which England will be eliminated. They’re very scared. The government has helpfully prepared t-shirts which English football fans who are not football hooligans can wear to identify themselves. They say “Not a football hooligan.” Problem solved. A friend of mine is planning to buy a bunch, figuring they’ll become collector’s items.

In Jordan, for the first time a woman divorces a man.

The NY Times points out that when Bush was condemning Castro’s human rights record yesterday, he was standing next to the prime minister of Malaysia at the time.

One of the sillier conflicts is between Britain and Spain over control of Gibraltar. Talks are breaking down even as we speak, in part because Britain has promised not to change the Rock’s status without a referendum of the locals, who regard absorption into Spain much as Ian Paisley does the Irish Republic. Spain doesn’t want to admit to the principle of consulting people, because someone might suggest that the Basques be asked their opinion (Spain is about to ban the Basque independence party Batasuna).

Speaking of referenda, do you notice that no one but no one is demanding the referendum that was supposed to be held for the last 50 years in Kashmir? One reason I have trouble choosing up sides there is that I really have no idea what the majority of the Kashmiri people actually want.

The Democrats are shocked, shocked, to find that there is fund-raising going on (that’s a Casablanca allusion, in case you missed it). Bush is using in his fund-raising a photo of himself on Air Force One on the phone to Dick Cheney on September 11, asking “Can I come home yet?” This is said to be capitalizing on a national tragedy, although Bill Maher says that another picture, of Bush after the last election, is doing the same. I never watch his show, but I’m kind of sorry he’s been cancelled.

Every cloud of uncertainty has a coal-black lining

The Bush admin has asked a federal judge to reverse his decision suspending permits to mine for coal by ripping the tops off of mountains and tossing them in rivers. It says the decision “casts a tremendous cloud of uncertainty”. Better that than muddying the waters...

Since 1967 Israel has stolen 42% of the West Bank (actually, the report doesn’t say, but I’m assuming this doesn’t include the 25% or more of the West Bank that’s been annexed to “Jerusalem”). The settlements themselves don’t take up that much territory, but their municipal boundaries are to say the least generous. Add to that land allotted to the settlers’ regional councils, seized for military purposes, declared abandoned, declared “state land” under old Ottoman laws.....

On further reading of the details of Bush’s nuclear missile treaty, if “details” is not too grandiose a word for a 3-page document (compared to Start I’s 700 pages), I find it to be totally pointless. It requires literally nothing for the next ten years, and then when it’s about to require something, it expires. That Putin agreed to this amounts to a complete surrender. Will encourage Russia to store nukes, which leaves them open to theft, and does nothing about tactical nukes. It has no monitoring provisions.

Crown Prince whatsisface has been explaining that he spent a full five hours with Bush because Bush was such a complete ignoramus that he needed everything explained to him very slowly. The Guardian used a headline evoking comedian Harry Enfield’s upper-class twit character, Tim Nice But Dim.